Jung’s Lecture – The Psyche

May 5, 2016, By Editor

Jung turned to the blackboard and chalked a horizontal line high up. He stood back and, pointing, said, “The human psyche. Up above, on the surface, we have the conscious mind. Below it, the unconscious: the Cave of The Shadow. Notice that I have left more room below the line than above. Like an iceberg, most of the personality lies beneath the surface. Also, it is easier to write down here than up there…”

Jung added a sun symbol above the dividing line, a square on the line, and, directly below that, a filled-in square tagged “The Shadow.” He strode across the front of the room, stopped, and pointed back at the solid square.

“Everyone has his own personal Shadow, his dark repository of rejected and repressed traits, even Carl Jung, hard as that may be to believe…”

Picking up the chalk, he drew an eye on the blackboard to the left of the shadow square, then added a stick figure out to the right. “Roughly speaking, projection occurs when the unconscious perceives another person through the lens of its own Shadow.” Jung wrote “projection” beneath the square. “The darker our Shadow is, the more evil we are apt to see in others, even when it’s not there…”

“For this reason, we should be very careful when judging others. And even when we are not projecting, even when our judgment is sound, our opinion often lacks relevance.” [Pages 7-9, In the Mouth of the Lion]